Absentee ballots are increasingly being used throughout the United States. They are especially popular in the West Coast; elections are entirely absentee-ballot in Oregon and Washington, for instance.

The general reasoning behind absentee ballots are that they increase voter turn-out. The theory goes that voters too busy on election day can vote before the election. Absentee ballots make voting simpler, people say. If it is true that absentee ballots increase voter turn-out, then this would be a substantial advantage.

There is another great advantage to absentee ballots, however. Absentee ballots enable voters to make informed decisions, especially about local elections and measures which nobody has heard of.

So, I voted. I don’t remember the exact day, but it was sometime in early October. California allows residents to sign up for permanent vote-by-mail. They get their ballot a month in advance and can then mail it back in. You can vote with all the materials in front of you, you don’t have to wait in line, you can mull over your vote for a while and hold your mail-in ballot until the final weekend if you want, or even the final day (you can turn it in to any polling place). And it works extremely well.

In contrast to Florida and Ohio, two states suffering from the worst effects of Hurricane Sandy are working to ensure the maximum voter turnout tomorrow. Of course, both states suppress their voters by not holding early voting options. But New York and New Jersey, concerned about Election Day just one week after Superstorm Sandy, have made changes to their voting processes due to the storm.

Out of 2 million military and overseas votes cast in the 2010 election, only 4.6% of those votes were counted. This is scandalous. If these kind of results were occurring stateside, we’d be talking voter suppression on a massive scale.